


Raspberry Sours

by redgoldblue



Category: Leverage
Genre: Coda, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Episode: s05e11 The Low Low Price Job, F/M, I don't fix the parent rejection so consider this by way of a content warning, M/M, Multi, POV Alec Hardison, POV Eliot Spencer, Post-Episode: s05e11 The Low Low Price Job, Thiefsome Soft, but I don't dwell on it either, no i'm not gonna change it, yes I switch tenses when I switch POVs. no this was not intended nor is it a valid authorly decision
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-17
Updated: 2021-02-17
Packaged: 2021-03-12 17:47:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,908
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29513421
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/redgoldblue/pseuds/redgoldblue
Summary: At least he’s got family, whatever happens in Oklahoma. He’s got family.(A ‘Low Low Price Job’ coda)
Relationships: Alec Hardison/Parker/Eliot Spencer
Comments: 3
Kudos: 43





	Raspberry Sours

Parker had been vibrating around the Candy Shoppe for forty minutes, and Hardison had been watching her with, he’d admit, massive heart eyes, for half of that time. Because even he could only amuse himself for about twenty minutes in a store approximately the size of two cardboard boxes put together, even if the lollies were stacked literally to the ceiling (Parker rolled her eyes dismissively at the little stepladder on wheels until Hardison convinced her to try it out, mostly so the store owners didn’t get freaked out by her climbing all over their walls like a – what was that thing Eliot had called him – a Himalayan tree frog. Thirty seconds on it and she’d decided it was her new favourite thing. Hardison was attempting to figure out where he could put one in the brewpub and how he could install it without her noticing.). Anyway, forty minutes in and she finally descended to Hardison’s level – aka, standing on the bottom rung of the ladder – and said, “Where’s Eliot?”

Hardison shrugged and began to remove sweet packets from her hands to the counter. The whole point of this job had been to revitalise the local economy, so they were paying at this shoppe. Only half because Eliot would – well, not beat them up, but give them a Very Stern Look and probably withhold sex for a week if they didn’t. Hardison was pretty sure a packet of lemon sherbets had disappeared into Parker’s clothing at some point, but given that the sum total of the rest of their purchases was going to be enough to keep the lovely pair of wives behind the counter in business for the next six months at least, he figured that could be excused under Parker’s innate need to steal. “He was making eyes at the client earlier,” he told Parker. “He’s probably in the grocery flirting with her. You know he likes to do that. He’s allowed.” Hardison didn’t get jealous. Much. His prom date had told him his jealousy reflex was underdeveloped. He’d never bothered trying to get rid of what he did have when it came to Eliot, because he was pretty sure Eliot enjoyed it.

“She has a store to run,” Parker pointed out. “He wouldn’t distract her from it for this long.”

Which was a point, although Hardison was sorta surprised Parker realised how long it had been. “So he went home.”

“He wouldn’t without telling us.”

Hardison wasn’t totally sure about that. He’d been in a bit of a weird mood ever since he’d told Hardison about his dad. Which wasn’t unexpected, because opening up usually put him in a weird mood; but it also tended to make him cagey for the next little bit, and do things like just randomly disappear home. Still, Parker seemed mildly worried, and it was increasingly unlike him to disappear without letting them know, so Hardison pulled out his phone and hit the speed dial.

Eliot picked up within a couple rings, albeit silently, so Hardison said, “Hey, Eliot,” and beckoned Parker to the other end of the store, away from the counter, before he put him on speaker. Which was more symbolic than anything else, but the wives looked away and busied themselves with the register and altogether did their best to at least look like they weren’t listening, so. “Where you at?”

“Highway,” Eliot answered, and okay, he didn’t sound grumpy, really, but that was a little short even for him.

Parker leaned into the phone and asked, “Why are you on the highway?” and his tone softened slightly as he replied, “On my way to the airport,” which meant they’d probably just caught him off guard.

Parker frowned and continued, “Why are you going to the airport?” because she was nothing if not persistent, god bless her.

“Because it takes 30 hours to drive to Oklahoma.”

Oh. Parker opened her mouth like she was about to ask why he was going to Oklahoma, but Hardison made a hurried shushing motion at her. She turned her slightly confused frown on him, but stayed silent. Of course, Hardison then paused for probably too long himself, because he didn’t actually know what to say to that. “...When are you coming back?” he finally asked.

“Couple days. Hopefully.”

“Alright. I hope you...” He had no idea how to end that sentence, but Eliot seemed to get it anyway, because he sighed and replied,

“Thanks, Hardison. Love you both.”

They both managed to get in murmured reciprocations before Eliot hung up. Parker turned to Hardison with a Determined look on her face, and he held both hands up. “Let’s buy our candy. I’ll fill you in when we get home.”

She frowned again, but all she said was, “Let’s find something for Eliot. For when he gets home.”

“Yeah,” Hardison agreed. “Let’s do that.”

~

He’d told Eliot back then, if he left, not to bother coming back. Eliot hadn’t expected it to still apply twenty years later. Or maybe he had, he doesn’t know, really. After all, there was a reason he waited until now to try. Part of that was just that he couldn’t have brought his pre-Leverage Consulting life to their door, but more of it was that he knew that without someone to go back to after, without another family, the risk of exactly this outcome was too high. The risk of it breaking him was too high. So even though he didn’t think it through, it doesn’t come as a surprise when he finds himself parking outside the brewpub instead of his private apartment, even though it’s the middle of the night – more accurately, the start of the morning – and he shouldn’t be disturbing Hardison and Parker.

It’s a long trek up the back stairs, and he hesitates for a moment before he fishes out his key and opens the door as quietly as he can. Or maybe it’s not as quietly as he could’ve, because he knows he’s not going to deliberately wake them up, but he wants to talk with them, even though he has no idea what he’ll say. He’s only a couple steps in when Hardison appears anyway, so maybe it was a moot point. He’s wearing a white tank and his stupid The Flash boxers, despite Eliot’s repeated insistence that that is not something you should be merchandising underwear with, so obviously he was at least in bed if not asleep. “Eliot,” he says, sounding faintly surprised even though, who else would be letting themselves in with a key at 3am. “You’re back early.”

Eliot just nods, because he’s not sure he trusts himself to open his mouth without his voice cracking. Hardison murmurs, “Oh,” and opens his arms. “Hug?”

Eliot nods again, and lets himself walk into Hardison, who immediately wraps his arms around him. After a moment, he taps Eliot on the shoulder, and they break apart just enough to move out of the corridor into the apartment proper before Hardison pulls him in again.

It’s only a few seconds later when he hears something move above them, and over Hardison’s shoulder he sees Parker drop from the balcony railing, flip in mid-air, and land on the bench. “Eliot!” she exclaims, then sees his face properly and repeats, “Eliot?”

He reaches out to her with one arm, stopping an inch away and waiting for her to breach the final space. Which she does, throwing herself off the bench and onto Eliot, her left side colliding/connecting with Hardison in the process. They stumble back a couple steps, but stabilise quickly, Eliot supporting Parker with an arm under her thigh as she wraps her legs around both of them, and Hardison pulling his left arm out from where it got smushed into his side and resting it over Parker’s back, hand landing on Eliot’s shoulder.

Eliot sighs, and lets himself sink into Parker’s steady weight and Hardison’s familiar scent. He always smells faintly like chestnuts, for reasons Eliot has never been able to fathom. The unit shifts slightly as Eliot deliberately lowers and stabilises his own centre of gravity, bringing himself back to ground.

“Come upstairs?” Hardison asks softly into his ear, and he nods. Parker shifts around, using Eliot’s shoulders as leverage, until she’s piggybacking Eliot, and he wraps his arms around her legs and leans into Hardison, who stays stuck beside him the whole way up.

They land in the living room, on the couch in front of the second set of giant screens, these ones used primarily for watching terrible B-grade sci-fi movies (because Eliot would suffer through a lot worse to see Hardison almost bouncing with delight and Parker expounding at length about anatomical inaccuracies only to then gasp at the plot twists. The terrible, terrible plot twists). ‘Land’ is the most accurate term, too, as they all drop onto the couch together. A moment of shifting and Eliot is squashed between Hardison and the arm of the couch, with Parker lying across both of them, her feet in Hardison’s lap and her head on Eliot’s shoulder. Usually he’d be pushing one or both of them off, but not tonight.

“They...?” Hardison asks, because the man always thinks more information is better than less. Eliot does know that he’ll drop it if Eliot tells him to, or even if he just doesn’t answer, but he replies anyway, his first words since he got back.

“They didn’t even answer the door.”

The arm that Hardison has resting around Eliot’s shoulders tightens, even though there’s no physical way he can pull Eliot any closer. Parker leans back and straightens up slightly to ask, her face close enough to Eliot’s that he can feel the words brush across his mouth,

“What happened? When you were 18?” Eliot just winces slightly and shakes his head at her.

“Okay. It’s alright, I don’t have parents either,” she offers, and he can _feel_ something in his face drop even before she squints at him, frowning, and says with a touch of sadness, “I’m not helping, am I?”

Eliot manages a wan half-smile. “Not really,” he admits. “But it helps that you’re trying.”

He hasn’t actually stopped touching either of them since he walked in the door – or maybe it’s that they haven’t stopped touching him – but at that, Parker nods slowly, runs a hand down his side, then disconnects and disappears out of the room.

“Where is she going?” Eliot asks.

Hardison shrugs and replies, “Who can predict the whims of the Parker?”, even though when Eliot turns to look at him, he’s got the sort of knowing expression that means in this case he actually has a decent prediction on the whim of the Parker and is just choosing to keep it to himself. Eliot doesn’t push, just nods and falls silent again.

“I don’t know what to say,” Hardison admits, and all Eliot can muster is a tired, “Yeah.”

“They’re fools if they don’t- for not taking the chance to have you in their lives.” He pauses for a second, then continues, “No, don’t look at me like that,” before Eliot can even summon the look. “They are. I don’t know what happened twenty years ago, and you don’t have to tell me, but there’s nothing that could be worth this. I don’t think there’s a fight we could have that I wouldn’t regret in twenty minutes.”

That does manage to draw something close to a laugh out of Eliot, and he can feel Hardison’s reactive grin more than he can see it. It’s true, is the thing; he left Hardison drowning in a damn pool with no explanation and he still didn’t manage to ice him out for longer than half an hour. But that says more about Hardison than it does Eliot.

It’s usually Parker’s realm with Eliot, but Hardison occasionally manages to pick up on his thoughts before he says them, and he clearly does it now because he sighs and says, “I’m not doing this right, am I? Point is- well, points are, one, I’m sorry. I’m sorry it went down like that, and you don’t deserve to be locked out like that. Two, you got family. With or without them, you’ve got family. I can call Nana if you really need a parent, and she’ll be down here adopting you in about ten seconds flat.”

That draws another laugh, partly at the sheer absurdity of the thought and partly because he can almost picture the woman he’s spent a unified total of maybe an hour talking to across the years actually doing it. Through sheer determination if nothing else.

“Point three,” Hardison continues, relaxing slightly at Eliot’s laugh. “I know it probably won’t help, but do you want me to fuck up their wi-fi for the next few days? Because I can fuck up their wi-fi for the next few days.”

“No, Hardison, I don’t want you to mess with their internet. But thank you.”

“Well, the offer stands,” Hardison tells him, and Eliot hums in acknowledgement. That’s the moment Parker chooses to re-enter, holding a small paper bag, making Eliot wonder if she’d been listening from the next room. He hadn’t bothered to check his instincts, and he was distracted, so it’s possible. In any case, she pads over to them, completely silent, which means she’s holding herself with caution. It’s a relief to realise that he doesn’t even consider that that could be anything other than her being afraid of hurting him. Which is such a patently absurd concept that it chips another crack into the pain that’s been set around the base of his lungs since Oklahoma.

She sits cross-legged on the coffee table in front of them and holds the paper bag out to Eliot. “We got you raspberry sours,” she explains as he takes it. “At the Candy Shoppe. Because you were trying to tell me about making raspberry vinegar.”

And there’s tears in his eyes again. He really hates having his body this emotionally high-strung. Parker’s squinting at him, so he tucks them into his shirt pocket and reassures her, “Good tears, Parker, it’s okay. Thank you.”

She nods, pauses, then asks, “Do they have a way to find you? If they change their minds?”

She really is the most practical of all of them. Eliot takes a deep breath, regretting it as it shudders and jumps on the way out, and answers, “Yeah. I left the beer. He knows I’m in Portland, if he... if they... they can find me. If they want to.”

Parker starts to say something in reply, but cuts herself off in the middle by yawning, arching like a cat as she does. That sets Eliot off, smothering it into the crook of his elbow, which sets Hardison off, pulling his arm back from around Eliot to cover his mouth and shaking his head vigorously.

“Bed?” Eliot suggests, and they both nod. Hardison edges out between Eliot and Parker even though it would have been easier to go out the other side, and leads the way, letting Eliot and Parker tag along behind him, knocking shoulders.

Eliot doesn’t actually feel the hand slip into his pocket, but halfway to the bedroom door Parker is holding a raspberry sour up to his lips. When he opens his mouth enough for her to slip it in, the flavours burst on his tongue, fresh and sharp and vibrant. “Mm. These are really good,” he says, slightly surprised.

“Yeah, they’re all natural organic blah blah, and they make them all there themselves,” Hardison, who’s already on the bed but has obviously been watching them, says.

“I wonder if they’d give me their recipes if I asked real nice? Or at least the basics...”

Hardison laughs and props himself up his elbows as Eliot and Parker walk into the bedroom. “You can look into our new candying side business tomorrow, babe. Sleep time now for all good boys and girls.”

“Bad boys and girls,” Parker corrects over Eliot’s shoulder, then slips around him and launches herself onto the bed. She lands on the opposite edge to Hardison, leaving the middle space for Eliot tonight, then immediately stretches over it anyway to lay her head on Hardison’s chest while Eliot gets ready. He pauses for a moment before he does that, and just looks at them. His family. The pain in his chest isn’t gonna go away any time soon, but at least he can live with it now.

~

With what little information he has from Eliot, Hardison searches the net. He finds Mr. & Mrs. Spencer, who live a ways out of Oklahoma City; he finds their commonly used IP addresses (there’s only like, three of them); and he sets up those IP addresses to route to a slightly different version of the Bridgeport website. One that has the photos of Eliot in the review tab that he’s always taking down; one that puts ‘Chef: Eliot Spencer’ right there on the front page. He has no idea whether they will go looking, and neither does Eliot seem to, but this is what he can do. He can make sure that if they try to find their son, they can. And in the meantime, he can try to make Eliot believe what Hardison knows, that they’re only worse off for not knowing him. And keep reminding him that he’s not alone, either way.


End file.
